1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed in general to field of information processing. In one aspect, the present invention relates to a wireless telecommunications system, apparatus, and method for aligning signal paths.
2. Description of the Related Art
Wireless communication systems increasingly use multiple RF transmission paths to transmit and receive over multiple antennas to achieve diversity benefits such as increased signal throughput, reliability and/or quality. For example, a multi-antenna base station may have different signal path delays for the transmit or receive signal paths between the radio base station and the radio equipment antennas. In such cases, the different signal path delays can present challenges in meeting timing alignment requirements between radio transmitter branches such as imposed by 3GPP technical specifications which limit the deviation between transmission paths, such as 3GPP TS 36.104, v9.5.0, paragraph 6.5.3. Phase delay management can be especially challenging with large cellular base stations involving many antennas and carriers where the base station controller maybe connected to antennas through variety of RF systems which usually have different hardware latencies due to different hardware implementation and link delay.